Album 2 - Roseanna Angel Lawrence

Obsessions of a Filmmaker

All tracks available as sheet music if required.

It’s important to note that no album is ever one person’s work. Although I composed all compositions. This album would not exist without the collaboration of other skilled and talented people. I'm grateful to everyone that I worked with.

Adrian Marks, for all his hard work on this project, with all the technical skills he provided during the making of this album and many hours he gave to the project.

Red Sands Music for mastering this album and mixing tracks a the studio. I was glad that they agreed to work on this project with me and they did a wonderful job, it was fantastic working with them, they are highly skilled and experts in orchestration, the album wouldn't be what it is without them.

Jonathan Hall for becoming my 'Obsessive Filmmaker' and appearing on the front cover

Composing can be very hard work, it requires a great deal of disclipline, often you are working on your own over many long hours. I threw out many early compositions on this project and there were many technical frustrations along the way. Having an illness, like me, makes composing even harder. But nothing is impossible with hard work and dedication.

You have to work hard, I often get lost in music.

Sometimes, you can spend literally hours composing and find that you have very little, that the composition or melody is not as strong as it should be. It can be a painful process, however, when something goes right, it can be a wonderful experience watching a composition develop and come to life and choosing the instruments for each part. Some compositions on this album are more complicated with counterpoint, modulations and arpeggios, others more simplified compositions, like ‘Heroine of Sorrow’ which was very unassuming composition technique, but has its own delicate beauty created with strings and synthesizer that I play. ‘The Colour of Dreams’ was also a much more minimalist composition design.

This album is very different than the last album 'Wanderer in the City Landscape' as no track is over 100 bpm, it's a much slower album. I've concentrated on composing for strings and orchestration, as I really admire strings in film soundtracks. This album is not about the environment, but is set around a fictional character.

Music can tell a story,to me that's important when composing. I saw each track as a small part of this fictional filmmakers life. A snapshot. A polaroid. I see this is a soundtrack for fragments of his life.

One of the earliest classical compositions created around a fictional story was composed by French Composer Hector Berlioz, it was called Symphonie Fantastique. In his case, each changing part of the composition represented a new dramatic scene of the story. He was a very melodramatic young man, a genius, he had a wild host of characters he invented and a very dramatic story involving drugs, hell and unrequited love. Leonard Bernstein defined Berlioz's symphony as the first musical journey into psychedelia because of its hallucinatory and dream-like nature.

It is said that Berlioz may have used opium when he composed, if one looks at his story, one can believe it. It certainly helped him!

It was while I was reading Berlioz's fictional story that went along with his music compositions when studying a course in composition and sheet music, that I decided I would create a fictional character to compose this album around. At that point I was struggling to be creative and could not compose. I needed inspiration. Most filmmakers are known to be obsessive, thus the title seemed a natural decision.

I drew up a short story for the album and created an obsessive filmmaker, he struggles moving from the film world to his normal life, he is capable of creating incredible visual imagery as a filmmaker. Having a fictional character in my head when composing music and coming up with new ideas, meant that I could see this person in my mind, think about what kind of character they were, how they thought and perceived their world, how they saw their own individual world and create the music around this fictional figure, this helped me enormously and I was able to compose.

The man who taught me, used Berlioz of an example of using a story with composition.

Music is a language, although this is music without speech, it can build a character or a world. Emotion can be composed with a rise of octaves or lowering octaves, changing modulations and appegios can create a completely different landscape. Composing with a story or character in mind can be a very interesting experience creatively. I often use psychology in my music in different ways. When creating the character, I thought about about the personality, traits, childhood and memories that this character has and wrote them down to create a three-dimensional person, very much the same way you would when writing a fictional story.